The Copper Alembic: Why We Distil in Small Batches

There is a temptation, in any craft, to scale. To take what works once and ask it to work a thousand times over. We have resisted it. Our copper alembic holds barely two hundred litres, and we fill it slowly, by hand, with material cut that same week.

Small batches mean we can read each one. A field harvested in the cool of morning behaves differently in the still than one cut under a hot afternoon sun — and at this scale, we can listen to that difference rather than average it away. The first oil to come across is bright and volatile; the last is deep and resinous. We decide, batch by batch, where to make the cut.

The cost of slowness

A larger still would give us more oil per hour and a more uniform result. But uniformity is not the same as quality. The signature of a season — a wet spring, a late frost, an unusually dry July — survives only when the batch is small enough to carry it. That is the trade we have chosen to make.